By 2030, how will AI shape the average North American city? In a century-long study of the impact of AI, an expert panel believes its effects will be profound.
Eric Horvitz, technical fellow and managing director at Microsoft Research, came up with the idea for the One Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence.
The current state of AI and its future directions will be assessed every five years by a panel of experts. The first panel, composed of experts in AI, law, political science, policy, and economics, was launched last fall. They decided to focus their report on the impact AI will have on the average American city. Within fifteen years, they predict eight key aspects of city life will change.
1. The transportation system
The public may be surprised by the speed of the transition to AI-guided transport. Autonomous vehicles will be widely adopted by 2020, and they won’t just be cars – driverless delivery trucks, autonomous drones, and personal robots will also be commonplace.
It is likely that in the future, car ownership will be replaced by “cars as a service,” while public transportation may become more on-demand or displace car ownership. Modern cities could drastically change with commutes becoming a time for relaxing or working, encouraging people to live further from home, reducing parking needs, and encouraging people to commute more.
By analyzing mountains of data from increasing numbers of sensors, administrators will be able to model individuals’ movements, preferences, and goals. This could have a profound effect on city planning.
However, humans won’t be left out of the loop. In order for autonomous transportation to function smoothly, algorithms that allow machines to learn from human input will be crucial. In addition to being the first public experience of physically embodied AI systems, this will have a significant impact on public perception.
2. Robots for home and service
In the next 15 years, robots will do things like deliver packages and clean offices. Systems-on-a-chip already pack the processing power of last century’s supercomputers, allowing robots to do more with less on-board computing.
Learning will be accelerated by cloud-connected robots sharing data. With low-cost 3D sensors like Microsoft’s Kinect, perception technology will advance faster, while advances in speech comprehension will enhance robot-human interaction. It is likely that around 2025, robot arms will be used as consumer devices in research labs.
Nevertheless, general-purpose robots remain some way off due to the cost and complexity of reliable hardware and the difficulty of implementing perceptual algorithms in the real world. Commercial robotics applications are likely to remain narrow for some time to come.
3. The healthcare sector
Regulation will have a greater impact on AI’s impact on healthcare in the next 15 years than technology. AI has the potential to transform healthcare, but the FDA has failed to find ways to balance privacy and data access. It has also been difficult to implement electronic health records.
By mining patient records and scientific literature, AI could automate the legwork of diagnostics. Doctors could use intuitive and experienced judgment to guide the process of care by using this kind of digital assistant.
Personalized medicine will be possible through patient records, wearables, mobile apps, and genome sequencing at the population level. The use of huge datasets of medical imaging will allow for the training of machine learning algorithms that can “triage” or check scans, reducing doctors’ workloads.
Smart home technology can support and monitor the elderly to keep them independent, as well as provide intelligent walkers, wheelchairs, and exoskeletons. During the next decade, robots may enter hospitals to carry out simple tasks such as delivering goods to the right room or securing sutures once the needle is placed correctly, but these tasks will only be semi-automated and will require collaboration between humans and robots.
4. Educate yourself
Individual learning and classroom learning will blur by 2030. Personalized education will be possible with massive open online courses (MOOCs) and artificial intelligence (AI). It will not replace the classroom, but online tools will help students learn at their own pace.
In addition to learning individual preferences, AI-enabled education systems will also accelerate the development of new tools and education research. Through online education, educational access will be expanded, making learning lifelong, enabling individuals to retrain, and allowing developing countries to access top-quality education.
A virtual reality system will allow students to immerse themselves in historical and fictional worlds, or explore environments and scientific objects that are difficult to experience in the real world. Also, digital reading devices will become much smarter, linking to supplementary information and translating between languages.
5. The low-resource community
By 2030, AI will improve the lives of the poorest members of society, contrary to dystopian sci-fi visions. By forecasting environmental hazards or building code violations, predictive analytics will help government agencies allocate limited resources more effectively. The use of artificial intelligence (AI) could help restaurants distribute surplus food to food banks and shelters before it spoils.
These capabilities are underfunded, so their emergence may be delayed. The fear is that valueless machine learning could discriminate inadvertently based on racial, gender, or surrogate factors like zip codes. In contrast, AI programs are easier to hold accountable than humans, so they are more likely to eliminate discrimination.
6. Keeping the public safe and secure
AI is likely to play a major role in detecting and predicting crime in cities by 2030. CCTV and drone footage can be processed automatically to detect anomalous behavior quickly. By doing so, law enforcement will not only be able to react quickly but also predict when and where crimes will occur. In spite of legitimate concerns about unfair targeting, well-designed systems could actually counteract human bias and highlight police abuse.
Interrogators and security guards could detect suspicious behavior using techniques such as speech analysis and gait analysis. In contrast to concerns about overly intrusive law enforcement, AI is likely to make police work more targeted and less intrusive.
7. The workplace and employment
AI will have the greatest impact on the workplace. By 2030, AI will be threatening skilled professionals like lawyers, financial advisers, and radiologists. With smaller workforces, organizations will be able to scale more quickly as technology becomes more capable of taking on more roles.
It is more likely that AI will replace tasks than jobs in the near term. However, it will also create new jobs and markets, even if it is challenging to imagine what those will be. As automation increases, the costs of goods and services will also fall, effectively making everyone richer even though incomes and job prospects may decrease.
To ensure that these riches are shared, structural shifts in the economy will require political as well as economic responses. A guaranteed basic income or a far more comprehensive social safety net may be necessary in the short term, but in the long run this may require more radical approaches.
8. The entertainment industry
Entertainment in 2030 will be interactive, personalized, and immeasurably more engaging than it is today. The home will increasingly be filled with virtual reality, haptics, and companion robots as a result of breakthroughs in sensors and hardware. In addition to interacting with entertainment systems conversationally, users will also be able to demonstrate emotion, empathy, and adapt to external cues, such as the time of day.
In addition to providing personalized entertainment channels through social networks, media companies will be able to personalize entertainment to unprecedented levels thanks to the massive amounts of data being collected on usage patterns and preferences. Media conglomerates may have unprecedented control over the online experiences and ideas people are exposed to as a result of this.
AI advances will also make creating your own entertainment far easier and more engaging, whether it’s composing music or choreographing dances with an avatar. It is virtually impossible to predict how highly fluid human tastes will evolve as high-quality entertainment becomes democratized.